Hell No! We can’t go!: Why on Earth Would the US Go to War with Iran over an Attack on Saudi Oil Refineries?

Burning Saudi oil refinery following attack reportedly by Houti forces using drones, possibly supplied by Iran

 By Dave Lindorff

President Bone Spur, backed by his war-mongering Secretary of State Mike “Armageddon” Pompeo, tweeted yesterday that the US military is “locked and loaded,” ready to attack (bomb) Iran if it can be proven that Iran was behind a drone bomb attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries.

There are plenty of news media in the US that are seconding that notion of reflexively starting a hot war with Iran if it can be shown that Iran and not Houti forces in Yemen attacked Saudi oil facilities. Certainly that is the case with Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

But hold on. Is anyone asking why the US has to do this, or even has a right to do this? If anything, the loss, even temporary, of half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capability doesn’t hurt the US. Unlike in 1973-74, when Saudi Arabia led OPEC in an embargo of oil shipments to the US for its support of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, today the US is self-sufficient in oil and gas and in fact is a net exporter, meaning that with Saudi exports cut in half, the market for US oil will be bigger and at higher prices.

Furthermore, the US has no mutual assistance treaty with Saudi Arabia — no obligation to defend the autocratic Islamic kingdom or even to come to its aid. True, the US sells a lot of weapons and weapons systems to the Saudis, including for its brutal and genocidal war on its impoverished neighbor to the south, Yemen, whose Houti leaders are claiming to have been the authors of the recent drone attack on Saudi refineries. But if anything, those US weapons sales have simply exacerbated instability in the region by encouraging the intensification of the Saudi-Yemeni war. It would be the height of irony if those weapons sales, by provoking a Houti reaction, led to the US becoming embroiled in yet another endless war with another Middle Eastern country, this time Iran, a country twice the size of Iraq, and with a far better equipped and motivated military, and which backs the Houtis in Yemen.

With no treaty obligations to meet, no “honor” to defend, not even any economic reason to retaliate against Iran, and moreover, with no real proof that Iran did anything more than the US has been doing — that is supply weapons to one of the antagonists in the conflict — it is absurd for the US to be readying its military to launch a war against Iran over an issue like this.

Looked at objectively, if Iran were behind the Houti drone attack on Saudi oil refineries, it is likely a logical response to the US sanctions that have been imposed on Iranian oil — sanctions which have virtually shut down Iranian sales of its primary export…

 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/why-on-earth-would-the-us-go-to-war-with-iran-over-an-attack-on-saudi-oil-refineries/

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